The invention relates to high performance remote data processing and, more particularly, to a method of and apparatus for the effective remote assignment, transmission, processing, collection, and management of documents which can be represented as digital data.
Many industries require the processing and management of a large number of documents. These documents are typically paper, but can also include other physical media, such as photographs, audio or video recordings, art works, physical evidence, etc. Much of the information in these documents may be converted into a digital format and stored into a computer system via a variety of techniques, such as digital scanning for paper and photographs and digital recording for audio and video. In addition, there are many source documents which are native to a computer environment, such as word processing and spreadsheet files or a record from a computer database. Documents which are composed of one or more of these different data types can be referred to as electronic or digital documents.
While the concept of electronic or digital documents is not new, the increasing use of digital imaging techniques to acquire and store business records, as well as the prevalence of personal computing data at the office, presents a series of technical opportunities and challenges for the efficient distribution and comprehensive management of such documents.
For instance, it is often desirable to grant remote access to electronic documents so that employees may work at home or some other remote location. Having employees work at home is becoming increasingly popular because it provides benefits to both the employer and the stay-at-home employee. So called, "telecommuting" employees can save a firm a great deal of overhead expense in terms of office space. Telecommuting also allows a firm to hire talented workers who could not otherwise work in the office setting. For example, employees with a long-term illness or physical handicap, or parents with small children may enthusiastically work at home because of the flexible work schedule, but could not conveniently work in an office.
Giving a remote employee access to the digital electronic documents upon which they must work presents several technical problems. These documents can be very large in size in terms of the number of digital bits they represent. The size of a typical bi-level 8.5-.times.11" page scanned at 200 dots per inch can range from 5K bytes to 200K bytes depending upon the amount of information contained on the scanned page. An average compressed image size could be 50K bytes. Color and gray scale images can be an order of magnitude larger, and audio/video recordings an order of magnitude larger again. This contrasts sharply with typical ASCII data transmissions which are less than 2K per terminal screen in size.
Secondly, in many occupations, a remote employee will be rated or compensated based on productivity, such as the number of forms processed per hour. Because the document is delivered to the remote employee via the transmission and display of digital data, the workstations through which the remote employees work must be capable of a sufficiently high level of performance that they do not impede the employee's productivity. Assuming that the performance of a workstation in the central office is adequate for the requisite productivity, the remote workstations have the problem of maintaining performance levels while coping with the additional task of receiving and transmitting the data over a considerable distance.
These issues of electronic document data size and high workstation performance are typically solved by the use of higher bandwidth telecommunications facilities. While very high bandwidth facilities are available from a local phone company, they can also be prohibitively expensive. A practical economic alternative for a small remote site is a medium bandwidth "switched line" digital service. The "switched line" offered by the telephone company has one transmission wire installed between the remote site and the phone company and another wire installed between the phone company and the central office. As with typical voice telephone service, the phone company connects the two sites on an "on-demand" basis and charges for the connection based on a series of call factors, including the time of day and the duration of the connection. Thus, like any other business expense, it becomes highly desirable to minimize the ongoing cost of the telephone service required to support the transmission of these electronic documents.
One type of medium bandwidth switched line is the Integrated Services Digital Network ("ISDN") which has three transmission channels, two of which transfer data at a 64K band rate (the so called "B channels") and one of which transfers data at 16K band, for a total 144K baud bandwidth. U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,930,123 of Shimzu and 5,200,993 of Wheeler et al. describe the communication of data to remote workstations using ISDN lines.
Further problems are presented to the employer of a team of remote employees. In order to manage, control, and compensate the activity of the remote employees, the employer must have the capability of efficiently making work assignments of the digital documents, and monitoring and managing the progress of the assignments. This gives the employer the ability to make sure that the work is completed in a timely and cost effective manner and that an individual worker's activity is assessed and compensated accurately. The accomplishment of this work management in a distributed remote environment can be greatly enhanced by the use of automated processes for work assignment, monitoring, accounting, and compensation.